ISTANBUL (AP) — About a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

To many people in the West, the statement was ludicrous, almost laughable if it weren't so incendiary. And surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the U.S. orchestrated the attacks.

However, the belief persists strongly among a minority, even with U.S. allies like Turkey or in the U.S. itself. And it cannot be dismissed because it reflects a gulf in politics and perception, especially between the West and many Muslims.

"That theory might be true," said Ugur Tezer, a 48-year-old businessman who sells floor tiles in the Turkish capital, Ankara. "When I first heard about the attack I thought, 'Osama,' but then I thought the U.S. might have done it to suppress the rise of Muslims."

Compassion for the United States swept the globe right after the attacks, but conspiracy theories were circulating even then. It wasn't al-Qaida, they said, but the United States or Israel that downed the towers. Weeks after the strikes, at the United Nations, President George W. Bush urged the world not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories" that deflected blame from the culprits.

However, the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provided fodder for the damning claim that the U.S. killed its own citizens, supposedly to justify military action in the Middle East and to protect Israel. A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey — all among the most moderate nations in the Islamic world — said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks.

Two years later, a poll of 17 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project, found majorities in nine of them believed al-Qaida was behind the attacks. However, the U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

Such beliefs have currency even in the United States. In 2006, a Scripps Howard poll of 1,010 Americans found 36 percent thought it somewhat or very likely that U.S. officials either participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them.

Those who say the attacks might have been an "inside job" usually share antipathy toward the U.S. government, and often a maverick sensibility. Besides Ahmadinejad, high-profile doubters include Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura has questioned the official account. Conspiracy theorists have heckled former President Bill Clinton and other prominent Americans during speeches.

Controversy over U.S. actions and policies, including the widely discredited assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, reinforced the perceptions of conspiracy theorists. Iranians dug deeper into history, recalling the U.S.-backed coup in their country in 1953.

"Initially, I was doubtful about the conspiracy theories. But after seeing the events in later years, I don't have any doubt that it was their own operation to find a pretext to hit Muslim countries," said Shaikh Mushtaq Ahmed, a 58-year-old operations manager in a bank in Pakistan. "It's not a strange thing that they staged something like this in their own country to achieve a big objective."

In March, an editorial in The Washington Post harshly criticized Yukihisa Fujita, a lawmaker with the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, for saying in an interview that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were alive and that shadowy forces with advance information about the plot played the stock market for profit. Fujita said the article contained factual errors.

The record shows that al-Qaida agents on a suicide mission hijacked four American passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people. The evidence is immense: witness accounts, audio recordings, video and photographic documentation, exhaustive investigations and claims of responsibility by al-Qaida.

Yet every fact and official assertion only feeds into alternative views that become amplified on the Internet, some tinged with anti-Semitism because of the close U.S.-Israeli alliance. They theorize that a knowing U.S. government stood by as the plot unfolded, or that controlled demolitions destroyed the Twin Towers, and the Pentagon was hit by a missile.

"All this, of course, would require hundreds if not thousands of people to be in on the plot. It speaks volumes for the determination to believe something," said David Aaronovitch, the British author of "Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History."

"This kind of theory really does have a big impact in the Middle East," he said. "It gets in the way of thinking seriously about the problems in the area and what should be done."

A U.S. State Department website devotes space to debunking conspiracy theories about Sept. 11, in the apparent belief that the allegations must be addressed forcefully rather than dismissed out of hand as the ruminations of a fringe group.

"Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas," the site says.

Tod Fletcher of Petaluma, California, has worked as an assistant to David Ray Griffin, a retired theology professor, on books that question the Sept. 11 record. He was cautious about the Iranian president's comments about conspiracy theories, suggesting Ahmadinejad may have been politically motivated by his enmity with the U.S. government.

"It seems like it's the sort of thing that could lead to further vilification of people who criticize the official account here in the United States," Fletcher said.

I've never heard of WorldPublicOpinion.org. Is that a "right wing" organization?

"Two years later, a poll of 17 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project, found majorities in nine of them believed al-Qaida was behind the attacks. However, the U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians."

Pew and other non-ideological outfits have conducted similar polls that discovered a sizable number of Muslims in Europe and the middle east believe these crackpot theories (even the educated ones that live above the poverty line).

Pew and other non-ideological outfits have conducted similar polls that discovered a sizable number of Muslims in Europe and the middle east believe these crackpot theories (even the educated ones that live above the poverty line).

I have had the displeasure of doing business with a few muslims and they are the abolsute worst, most paradoid bunch I have ever dealt with.

I had one case in the Bronx once and the other lawyer, who was a jew, and I went into the hallway to discuss the case amongst ourselves.

My client was muslim from bangladesh who did some work for another muslim and got screwed out of some money, but there were issue with the work. Anyway, we got back to the table and discussed a settlement proposal for less than the full amount to account for some of the deficiencies of the worl performed by my client and my client fired me on the spot saying I was selling out the jew in the hallway, that I was on the take, and that I was accepting a bribe to get him to accept a lesser amount than was sued for.

I never dealt with such craziness like that and walked away on the spot and told the client to go fuck himself. I withdrew from the case and never spoke to the guy again.

What do muslims think about conspiracy theories that Islam wants to dominate the world and subdue all infidels?

There's also a theory that Muhammad was a delusional fool and that Islam being an Abrahamic religion is rooted in jewish fairy tales and based on lies. Will the muslims accept these conspiracy theories too?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a fiery tirade before the United Nations General Assembly Thursday, accusing the United States, Israel and NATO of tyranny and insinuating U.S. Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden in order to keep incriminating details about the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks secret.

Several minutes after Ahmadinejad began his half-hour long address, U.S. delegates and those of other nations walked out.

He spoke just one day after Iran released two American hikers who had been jailed as spies for more than two years. Ahmadinejad opened with a laundry list of questions:

“Which [governments] are responsible for the world economic recession?” he asked. “Which governments are ever ready to drop thousands of bombs on other countries?”

The controversial Iranian leader also pondered, “Who used the mysterious September 11th incident” to launch wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to obtain oil resources? He claimed that the U.S.-Special Forces killing of Osama bin Laden in May may have had a hidden agenda.

“Instead of assigning a fact-finding team, they killed the main perpetrator and threw his body into the sea. Why should it not have been allowed to bring him in to trial?” he inquired. “Is there any classified information that must be kept secret?”

Ahmadinejad, who has publicly questioned the historical legitimacy of the Holocaust, also criticized U.S. and European support of Israel.

“European countries still use the Holocaust after six decades as the excuse to pay ransom or fine to Zionists,” he blasted.

Similar outbursts at the world body have become a trademark of the Iranian leader, as has controversial remarks made in other forums. In 2005, published reports quoted Ahmadinejad as stating that “the occupying regime” of Israel “must be wiped off the map,” though there has been debate whether the original translation reprinted by media outlets across the globe was completely accurate. Ahmadinejad marked Israel’s 60th anniversary in 2008 by describing the Israeli regime as “a stinking corpse…on its way to annihilation.”

Iran has been under intense scrutiny by the United States and other nations to curtail its nuclear ambitions, which Ahmadinejad has insisted is aimed at peaceful endeavors, not nuclear weapons, as critics suggest.

On Tuesday, Ahmadinejad told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in an interview that Iran would halt uranium enrichment immediately if it’s offered the levels of enriched uranium it can use for peaceful power. The column was published Wednesday [Full Transcript Here].

“If they give us the 20-percent enriched uranium this very week, we will cease the domestic enrichment of uranium of up to 20 percent this very week,” he told Kristof. “We only want the 20 percent enrichment for our domestic consumption. If they give it to us according to international law, according to IAEA laws, without preconditions, we will cease domestic enrichment.”

Ahmadinejad made the same offer in an interview published in The Washington Post earlier this month.

President Barack Obama criticized Iran’s nuclear ambitions in his address to the U.N. Wednesday, telling world leaders: “The Iranian government can not demonstrate that its program is peaceful, [it] has not met its obligations, and rejected offers that would provide it with peaceful nuclear power.”

Ahmadinejad has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, which he told the U.N. General Assembly in 2008, has endured “sixty years of carnage and invasion … at the hands of some criminal and occupying Zionists.”

An anticipated move by Palestinians for a vote on statehood recognition—which would force a showdown with the United States, which has insisted on continued negotiations between Palestine and Israel before such a proposal—has dominated the current 66th General Assembly session of the world body.

Despite U.S. concerns, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is expected to present the application for statehood on Friday.

Sept. 22: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks during the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters.

The latest edition of a glossy al Qaeda-run magazine is out, and it slams Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the equivalent of a Sept. 11 "truther" -- someone who accuses the U.S. government of initiating the 2001 terror attacks on the United States.

Inspire magazine, the product of New Mexico-born cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, was pegged to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 bombing, but was posted on its website 16 days late, an indication, say analysts, that al Qaeda in Yemen is feeling pressure from U.S. counterterrorism operations and instability in the country.

The publication's seventh issue, obtained by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and provided to Fox News, is relatively short -- 20 pages -- compared to earlier editions. But it includes a section titled "Iran and the Conspiracy Theories."

"The Iranian government has professed on the tongue of its president Ahmadinejad that it does not believe that al Qaeda was behind 9/11 but rather, the U.S. government. So we may ask the question: why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?" opinion writer Abu Suhail asks.

Last week, Ahmadinejad appeared before the United Nations General Assembly and blasted the U.S. for disposing of al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden.

"Last year, when the need to form a fact-finding team to undertake a thorough investigation concerning the hidden elements involved in September 11 incident was brought up; an idea also endorsed by all independent governments and nations as well as by the majority in the United States, my country and myself came under pressure and threat by the government of the United States," Ahmadinejad said, referring to the United States.

"Instead of assigning a fact-finding team, they killed the main perpetrator and threw his body into the sea. Would it not have been reasonable to bring to justice and openly bring to trial the main perpetrator of the incident in order to identify the elements behind the safe space provided for the invading aircraft to attack the twin world trade towers?"

Several diplomatic delegations walked out of Ahmadinejad's speech.

"If Iran was genuine in its animosity towards the U.S., it would be pleased to see anotherentity striking a blow at the Great Satan but that's not the case. For Iran, anti-Americanism is merely a game of politics," reads Inspire's article. "Iran and the Shi'a in general do not want to give al Qaeda credit for the greatest and biggest operation ever committed against America because this would expose their lip-service jihad against the Great Satan."

Calling it "The Greatest Special Operation of All Time," the magazine, with its slick western-style graphics and layout, also appears to mock a World Trade Center tower with a cover image showing it in silhouette using dollar signs to fill out the design.

And it gives striking attention to high-profile Americans in the al Qaeda structure.

The magazine showcases California native Adam Gadahn, who is now a spokesman for al Qaeda in Pakistan as well as North Carolina native Samir Khan, who is believed to be hiding in Yemen and responsible for the magazine's slick western-looking graphics. The issue also features quotes from Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.

The most ominous picture is a preview of the next edition of the magazine, which shows a photo-shopped Grand Central and what appears to be Americans in long dark robes similar to burkas. Over Grand Central is the statement: "Targeting the Populations of Countries that are at war with the Muslims."

"Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki, Coming Soon." it reads.

An FBI official based in New York said the bureau takes all threats seriously, especially when specific and corroborated information are behind them.

"Grand Central Station is not a new threat target to [the Joint Terrorism Task Force] and we continue to work diligently with our partners throughout the city to mitigate every threat and keep every target safe," the official said.

New York Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne added: "It is part of continual evidence that New York remains of top of the terrorist target list, and why the NYPD has such a robust counterterrorism posture."

But analysts note the late release could be an indicator of struggles for Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, as the Yemeni network is known. Aside from pressure by the U.S., ongoing political unrest in Yemen may make it harder to operate.

ISTANBUL (AP) — About a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

To many people in the West, the statement was ludicrous, almost laughable if it weren't so incendiary. And surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the U.S. orchestrated the attacks.

However, the belief persists strongly among a minority, even with U.S. allies like Turkey or in the U.S. itself. And it cannot be dismissed because it reflects a gulf in politics and perception, especially between the West and many Muslims.

"That theory might be true," said Ugur Tezer, a 48-year-old businessman who sells floor tiles in the Turkish capital, Ankara. "When I first heard about the attack I thought, 'Osama,' but then I thought the U.S. might have done it to suppress the rise of Muslims."

Compassion for the United States swept the globe right after the attacks, but conspiracy theories were circulating even then. It wasn't al-Qaida, they said, but the United States or Israel that downed the towers. Weeks after the strikes, at the United Nations, President George W. Bush urged the world not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories" that deflected blame from the culprits.

However, the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provided fodder for the damning claim that the U.S. killed its own citizens, supposedly to justify military action in the Middle East and to protect Israel. A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey — all among the most moderate nations in the Islamic world — said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks.

Two years later, a poll of 17 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project, found majorities in nine of them believed al-Qaida was behind the attacks. However, the U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

Such beliefs have currency even in the United States. In 2006, a Scripps Howard poll of 1,010 Americans found 36 percent thought it somewhat or very likely that U.S. officials either participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them.

Those who say the attacks might have been an "inside job" usually share antipathy toward the U.S. government, and often a maverick sensibility. Besides Ahmadinejad, high-profile doubters include Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura has questioned the official account. Conspiracy theorists have heckled former President Bill Clinton and other prominent Americans during speeches.

Controversy over U.S. actions and policies, including the widely discredited assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, reinforced the perceptions of conspiracy theorists. Iranians dug deeper into history, recalling the U.S.-backed coup in their country in 1953.

"Initially, I was doubtful about the conspiracy theories. But after seeing the events in later years, I don't have any doubt that it was their own operation to find a pretext to hit Muslim countries," said Shaikh Mushtaq Ahmed, a 58-year-old operations manager in a bank in Pakistan. "It's not a strange thing that they staged something like this in their own country to achieve a big objective."

In March, an editorial in The Washington Post harshly criticized Yukihisa Fujita, a lawmaker with the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, for saying in an interview that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were alive and that shadowy forces with advance information about the plot played the stock market for profit. Fujita said the article contained factual errors.

The record shows that al-Qaida agents on a suicide mission hijacked four American passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people. The evidence is immense: witness accounts, audio recordings, video and photographic documentation, exhaustive investigations and claims of responsibility by al-Qaida.

Yet every fact and official assertion only feeds into alternative views that become amplified on the Internet, some tinged with anti-Semitism because of the close U.S.-Israeli alliance. They theorize that a knowing U.S. government stood by as the plot unfolded, or that controlled demolitions destroyed the Twin Towers, and the Pentagon was hit by a missile.

"All this, of course, would require hundreds if not thousands of people to be in on the plot. It speaks volumes for the determination to believe something," said David Aaronovitch, the British author of "Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History."

"This kind of theory really does have a big impact in the Middle East," he said. "It gets in the way of thinking seriously about the problems in the area and what should be done."

A U.S. State Department website devotes space to debunking conspiracy theories about Sept. 11, in the apparent belief that the allegations must be addressed forcefully rather than dismissed out of hand as the ruminations of a fringe group.

"Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas," the site says.

Tod Fletcher of Petaluma, California, has worked as an assistant to David Ray Griffin, a retired theology professor, on books that question the Sept. 11 record. He was cautious about the Iranian president's comments about conspiracy theories, suggesting Ahmadinejad may have been politically motivated by his enmity with the U.S. government.

"It seems like it's the sort of thing that could lead to further vilification of people who criticize the official account here in the United States," Fletcher said.